October 19, 2017 — It is the American Dream – quit your 9-5 job and build your own business. Is that your dream as well? Are you thinking about taking the plunge and giving notice to your boss in order to embrace your entrepreneurial spirit?

This engaging discussion will present a foundation on things you need to think about when starting your own WordPress business – either Full-Time or even Part-Time. Topics include (but of course, are not limited to):
* How to get started
* What to charge
* Where to find clients
* Services to provide
* How to protect yourself
* Insurance (what? you need that?)
* Pitfalls to avoid
* Proposals, Agreements, and Contracts
* and more!

October 19, 2017

October 17, 2017 — Is your initial client discovery meeting generating bad ideas around your client’s organizational want and needs? Not focusing on the end user? Wouldn’t it be great to have more enthusiasm, more positive energy, more expertise, and more magic during your first client meeting?

My approach builds human-centered design and user experience into your design process. You’ll know your client before your first session, understand their industry and know who their customers are. I teach human-centered design as a creative approach to problem solving that unleashes creativity to put people at the center of the design process. Treating your client like a human refuels your web design process with better relationships and you emerge as a team from the beginning.

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October 17, 2017 — What is the schema.org structured markup and how does it impact search results, especially as the prevalence of voice search and devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home increases? How do you use this in a WordPress website? Learn the current recommended practices and pitfalls to watch out for.

October 17, 2017 — So you made changes to your WordPress theme using the built-in Customizer, but you would like the ability to make more changes to the look & feel of your theme, well this session is for you.

I will discuss the benefits of creating & modifying Child themes and show you how you can easily inspect and modify the css styles that control the bulk of overall design.

And if you want to dig deeper into theme customization, I will discuss the benefits of starter/foundational themes like Genesis.

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October 17, 2017 — In this talk, I will take you through the requirements, decision making, and steps I took to build WP in One Month, an online learning websites built on top of WooCommerce and LearnDash.

October 17, 2017 — So you can build a technically wonderful website, but does it appeal to your audience? Does it have finesse? Who is it designed for: the owner, the designer/developer, or the customer/user? Are forms user-friendly? This talk will show you the things that make a website more complete, user-friendly, and user-appealing. Topics will include favicons, custom 404 pages, form buttons, footers, colors, SSL certificates, and more.

Presentation Slides »

October 17, 2017 — I am cultivating a number of classes which use the Customizer API beyond the typical theme settings. I’ve also begun to build custom controls to allow for further customization of the Customizer. In this talk, I’d like to walk thru how to use the API, demonstrate the existing tools available and then show how to expand on them to better suit your specific needs.

October 17, 2017 — Whether you’re a budding developer, a pixel-perfect designer, or just like helping out, the WordPress community is always looking for people to help make WordPress even better. Hear how you can contribute to the WordPress community, even if you aren’t highly skilled.

October 17, 2017 — Many of us here aren’t developers. We might have a fuzzy notion of what they do, or why they’re important. When we run into an issue while using WordPress, we might know that it’s a developer who can fix the problem, but do we know how to explain the issue to them? Do we understand the answer they’re giving?

There’s a lot of technical jargon that many developers assume as common knowledge to anyone using WordPress. How is your backend configured? What theme are you running, and is it based on a framework? Is it a Genesis-based theme? Are you working with HTML5, CSS3, or SASS? What version of PHP is your server running? Are you on a shared host, a dedicated VPS, or a managed solution? Are you seeing a server error or a PHP error?

The avalanche of questions and terminology can be completely overwhelming.

In this talk, I’ll break down some basic terminology, explain the foundational concepts of how a WordPress site works, and try to help you bridge the language gap between you and your developer.